


Wide eyed and full of possibility

by hellokerry



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Political Campaigns, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:31:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellokerry/pseuds/hellokerry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the campaign trail, season six. Josh still loves her, and he's decided to do something about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wide eyed and full of possibility

"After you left, there was nothing there for me anymore."

She looks at him severely, as if he had slapped her, and maybe that's what he intended, or maybe it's just the harsh, yellow glow of the cheap motel lighting that is adding shadows to her pale face where there used to be none, where there used to be lines from smiles instead of frowns. It's been six months since she left, though Josh often feels all at once that it was years ago and just yesterday, the pain acute and throbbing in his chest. Donna left, and Josh was left with the stark realization that he never finished what he started in Germany - what they started seven years ago in a bar outside of Nashua, his heart beating out of his chest while she stole his french fries and argued with him about Kant. Back then, he thinks, it might have been lust, but the years that stretch in between this campaign and that have only heightened what Josh has been realizing since she started dating Jack Reese. What he knew all along.

He is in love with her, and the pain of her leaving has done nothing to dull that.

She takes another sip from her drink, slowly, trying to act nonchalant. He can tell that she's unsteady, though, maybe from the alcohol, or maybe fatigue, or maybe it's the barely concealed declaration that is lingering on the tip of his tongue that she can see, because she knows. She knows him. She has always known.

Josh is a little unsteady as well, but he hasn't been drinking. Not yet. She isn't his assistant anymore and she has hurt him in innumerable ways in her frustration that blossomed into anger, but it doesn't matter. She is Donna, and Josh would choose to sift through this pain over a life without her. He cannot live without her. He does not want to even try. He is choosing this. He is choosing her.

Her eyes glaze over as she considers him before snapping back into focus. He waits for her to acknowledge his statement; if he's honest, he hadn't thought much beyond this moment, he wasn’t sure how she’d react, but he's always been good at thinking on his feet, the top debater at Staples High.

Donna swallows. He can tell she's unsure of what to do with him. Unsure of herself maybe, too. She reaches for her glass, swirls the liquid around, stares at it, avoids his eyes. 

"Josh..."

He wants to kiss her, frantically and gently with all the emotions in between, to traverse the expanse of what has kept him from this woman for all these years and made him feel as if he were destined for her, somehow, in his boyish heart of hearts. The hand of fate that led her to choose his office and not Toby's or Sam's and led him to let her stay. She still has that pass, he knows, tucked in a drawer in her bedroom just as he's kept his heart locked in his desk as he's wandered the bull pen at night, a man possessed by the blonde haired temptress who sits outside his office and hands him folders laced with her perfume.

"Donna," he says, and he reaches across the table to grasp at her wrist. She looks up then, anger and confusion replaced by sadness and longing and, he thinks hopefully, maybe some of that old spark.

She loves him, he knows, just as he's loved her for what seems like centuries, and he kicks himself for only now deciding to do something about it. But he will do something about it. He is doing something about it now, or at least attempting the beginnings of something. They've spent forever on the precipice of a beginning and now he's grasping at tomorrow, armed with the epiphany he had watching her criticize his campaign on television for the umpteenth time. He wants to spend the rest of his life with her and he has to figure out how.

(He'll buy a ring in Nevada and keep it in his pocket for two years. He'll tell her he'd rather leave government than exist another minute without her by his side and he'll mean it, and she'll cry, and he'll cry, and they'll get married that fall with two presidents as witnesses and C.J. only half joking about a mail away license to officiate it. He'll take her to Italy, because Donna's only been out of the country once in her life and he has to rectify that memory for both of them, somehow.)

He sits there with her for a long time, his thumb tracing soft circles against her forearm as Donna orders another drink and stares off into the distance as if trying to make up her mind about something. The promise of a future that lingers just beyond her sightline that he is doing his best to illuminate for her again, to show her the possibilities of this brave, new world and all the unfinished lines she's been writing on the epitaph of his heart.

After Donna left, Josh hopped a plane to Texas and never looked back. He's looking back now, and he's looking at _her_ now, wide eyed and full of possibility and it's Donna, dozing next to him on the bus; it's Donna singing along badly to the music on the radio and it's Donna making him laugh when the car breaks down, when the speech goes wrong and he starts thinking that what they're doing won't work. She's covering him in her optimism and he's basking in that sunlight, taking it all in, letting the warmth of her fan out from his ears into the tips of his toes. It's Donna in his hotel room making coffee and inspiring him with her silly little thoughts that blossom into real, honest to God strategies that change everything, and they're discussing anything and everything, because it's Donna who had a million different majors at a school she dropped out of, it's Donna who is always leaving her future and then him for men who never deserve her and he wants to wrestle that insecurity out of her, tell her she's beautiful, that she deserves better. It's Donna scaling the walls of his mind and his heart and he can never get enough of her, he thinks. He wants to kiss her senseless and then he wants to just be with her, to sit quietly and marvel at this woman who found him against all odds in New Hampshire. He just wants to be with her.

There's more to this life than polling numbers and policy positions, he will tell her later at a truck stop in South Carolina, a spring in his step as the winter recedes. And she'll smile while resting a hand on his arm as he fishes around in his pockets for change to pay for their coffees.

Is there, she'll tease, ruffling the morning papers in his face.

Yes, he'll say. There's you.

There has always been you.


End file.
